Short Selling as a Business Model – Bloomberg

Thanks to MW for this find. Now here is an interesting business model: Use the funds from shorting another company’s stock to finance the sale of your own company’s competing goods and services for free.

The article points out an irony in this approach: capital markets are used to destroy value. However, I would argue this is not necessarily anti-capitalism. If one of the goals or hallmarks of capitalism is to efficiently allocate capital, then taking capital away from one company that gouges customers and sending it to another that does not accomplishes efficient capital reallocation. For example, why hasn’t this been vigorously applied to pharmaceuticals?